This blog is about using ICTs to develop climate change preparedness solutions built around Energy Internet and autonomous eVehicles

Energy Internet and eVehicles Overview

Governments around the world are wrestling with the challenge of how to prepare society for inevitable climate change. To date most people have been focused on how to reduce Green House Gas emissions, but now there is growing recognition that regardless of what we do to mitigate against climate change the planet is going to be significantly warmer in the coming years with all the attendant problems of more frequent droughts, flooding, sever storms, etc. As such we need to invest in solutions that provide a more robust and resilient infrastructure to withstand this environmental onslaught especially for our electrical and telecommunications systems and at the same time reduce our carbon footprint.

Linking renewable energy with high speed Internet using fiber to the home combined with autonomous eVehicles and dynamic charging where vehicle's batteries are charged as it travels along the road, may provide for a whole new "energy Internet" infrastructure for linking small distributed renewable energy sources to users that is far more robust and resilient to survive climate change than today's centralized command and control infrastructure. These new energy architectures will also significantly reduce our carbon footprint. For more details please see:

While most carriers are reluctant even to set targets for reducing
their carbon footprint, Australian ISP Internode has already been
carbon-neutral for a year.

The company, which has over 170,000 subscribers Australia-wide,
sources 100% of its electricity needs from renewable energy, and has
molded its equipment upgrade purchasing decisions towards energy
efficiency and sustainability.

The company has also started to invest in its own renewable energy
infrastructure, choosing to run a number of remote sites via solar
cells. With operators forced to pay a premium for piping power to
remote areas - and to provide expensive, long-lasting battery backups
- it is becoming cost-competitive to run these sites on solar, Lindsay
said.

Becoming carbon-neutral is “not as expensive an undertaking as most
people looking at it would imagine,” Lindsay said. In South
Australia, green power costs around 20% more than traditional forms of
power, and that is the dominant cost.

The positive publicity benefits of the decision likely outweigh any
extra financial burden, he added.

“Any telecom company can do what we've done,” Lindsay said.
“It's not as big a challenge as it looks. It comes down to the
fundamental question – do the shareholders of the business care more
about the dividend this year, or about the long-term impact of people
on the planet?”

Recent Publications

About Me

Bill St. Arnaud is a consultant and research engineer who works with clients around the world on a variety of subjects such as next generation Internet networks and developing practical solutions to reduce CO2 emissions such as free broadband and dynamic charging of eVehicles. He is an author of many papers and articles on these topics and is a frequent guest speaker. For more details on my research interests see https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Bill_Arnaud